Nancy Nowacek
Nancy Nowacek is an artist and designer. Her work focuses on the habits and practices of daily life as they relate to the natural and built environment, and the systems that produce and are produced in them. Her practice encompasses a wide spectrum of research: climate change, land use, the labor and leisure, and feminism and aging. She has shown work in the United States, Canada, China, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. She is co-founder of artist collective Works on Water and teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology. She is currently Education Artist-in-Residence at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Mary Miss
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts.
Trained as a sculptor, her work creates situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. Mary Miss has been redefining how art is integrated into the public realm since the early 1970s. She is interested in how artists can play a more central role in addressing the complex issues of our times—making environmental and social sustainability into tangible experiences. Collaboration has been central to her work as she has developed projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City and in WaterMarks, her current project creating an atlas of water for the city of Milwaukee.
Mary Miss has been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center. Among others, her work has been included in the exhibitions: Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change curated by Lucy Lippard, co-presented by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts Connections, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70’s, Brandeis Museum’s Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.
Miss’s influential work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Urban Land Institute’s Global Award for Excellence and the 2017 Bedrock of New York City Award.
Mariel Villeré
Trained as an architectural designer and historian, Mariel Villeré researches, writes, and organizes exhibits and cultural programming at the intersection of architecture, art, landscape, and the city.
She is currently the Program Development Director in the Office of Academic Initiatives and Strategic Innovation at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She was formerly the Manager for Programs, Arts and Grants at Freshkills Park/NYC Parks, where she worked to build the art program for the landfill-to-park site through an inquiry-based artist residency program, Field R/D, and through the on-site Studio+Gallery she founded in January 2018. Her work has been the subject of articles in Hyperallergic, Art in America, ArtSpace, andBOMB Magazine.
Her graduate thesis for the Masters of Science in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture & Art at MIT focused on the first documenta in 1955 in Kassel, Germany and related the exhibit design to the landscape and garden show in the midst of postwar urban reconstruction.
Other writings have been published by Sternberg Press, Thresholds, PLOT, MIT/Keller Gallery, RISD Int|AR, and Urban Omnibus independently and representing Freshkills Park. She occasionally updates her blog and boardsof visual inspirations and associations.
Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies
Rachel Stevens
Lise Brenner
Eve Mosher
Eve Mosher is a cultural change entrepreneur working at the frontline of climate change and the urban environment. She creates space for possible futures. Her work explores individual agency in transforming the systems that have led to this moment. She is uplifting what is possible through creative engagement, multi-sensory collaboration and radical imagination. She has been creatively working on the climate crisis since 2007, but none of her previous experience, accolades, press or degrees have adequately prepared her for the moment we are in.
Carolyn Hall
Carolyn Hall is a Brooklyn, NY based Bessie award winning freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist, and science communication instructor. As a freelance ecologist her research focuses on the past and present impacts humans have on shoreline ecosystems and the creatures within them. She is increasingly invested in combining her artist and scientist halves in public processes to make data-rich science more understandable, embodied, and memorable for the general public.
For her WoW residency, she will be asking questions about New York City’s long history and current relationship to fish and fisheries through an installation and embodiment of timelines. Timelines that span from "prehistory" to today. Timelines that explore connections stemming from documentations of fish species in NYC waters to our past and current questions about residence, im/migration, fluid boundaries, consumption, the value of an object vs. a living contributor to an ecosystem, and economy.
photo credit: Tara Duffy
Sarah Cameron Sunde
Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art, investigating scale and duration in relationship to the human body, the environment, and deep time. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her ongoing series, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 - present). Other honors include two MAP Fund Grants, NYSCA, Watermill Center Residency, Baryshnikov Residency, Princess Grace Award, and ongoing support from Invoking the Pause. Solo exhibitions include The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; NYU Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY; Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; and Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Tamaki Makaurau-Auckland. She holds a B.A. in Theater from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from The City College of New York, CUNY
Clarinda Mac Low
Clarinda Mac Low began in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. She is Executive of Culture Push, an organization linking artistic practice and civic engagement, and one of the co-founders and core team members of Works on Water. Mac Low’s recent work includes: “Sunk Shore,” a speculative tour of the future; “Incredible Witness,” game-based investigation of the sensory origins of empathy; “Free the Orphans,” spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age; and "Cyborg Nation," public conversation on the technological body and intimacy. Residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, and Mount Tremper Arts. Grants/Honors: BAX Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and Franklin Furnace grant. She has received BA Dance and Molecular Biology (Wesleyan University) and and MFA in Digital Interdisciplinary Arts Practice (CCNY-CUNY).
sTo Len
sTo Len is a genre fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len's work includes ongoing collaborations with bodies of water, transforming public space into art studios, recycling waste into art materials, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. sTo Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics. As part of WoW, Len created the Newtown Creek Center for Visual Research in Maspeth, Queens, and WoW Radio, a water-themed pirate radio show on Governors Island. www.stoishere.com
